liquid love . modernity melts.

And, in the liquid modern times, that is what makes love so vexing. We want love to yield to us like everything else does. We are inveterate shoppers and we insist on our consumer rights: love and sex must give us what we have come to expect from our other purchases - novelty, variety, disposability. In these times, even children become objects of emotional consumption, argues Bauman: the big question for liquid moderns considering having a family is this: can the investment in children be justifiable or is the risk-exposure too great? It's very difficult for liquid moderns to find that there are things - the most fundamental ones - like families, love and sex, that don't obey economic rules.

When Bauman turns from love, his hymn to the liquid moderns curdles and a loathing for our society becomes evident. In our liquid modern cities he finds a struggle between mixophobia and mixophilia, expressed through gated communities and hostility to immigrants, and their opposites. Here the struggle between freedom and security becomes more sinister. Bauman hopes for more ennobling struggles, more worthy work for us anxious and uprooted to do. How do we get to what Kant called the universal unity of mankind, where community means something and globalisation isn't just the extension of consumerism's banal remit? How does the liquid modern learn to do what is most alien to someone steeped in economic activity and so used to disposing of those they don't like: namely, to love his neighbour as himself?


http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/apr/19/highereducation.news